I bought a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop four years ago as a backup to my Dell desktop. I've started regularly using it now because the desktop has become as slow as molasses. And I find that when I try to type a document on the laptop, the cursor will inexplicably skip around so that I'm typing in the wrong place, or a whole line will just disappear while I'm typing. Is this characteristic of laptop computers or do I need to ditch this Dell and buy something else?
It is a common issue with laptops to have the touchpad get 'touches' from the victim's hands while typing. You can adjust the sensitivity of the touchpad or disable it altogether. Most people prefer to use a mouse.
I use a mouse. I can't stand the touchpad. And when I'm typing and something just disappears, I'm not aware of touching the touchpad. However, I'll try disabling it. I assume I go to the control panel for that. Thanks.
I had similar issues with a Dell laptop. After struggling with it for what seems like forever .. it ended up on an electronic garbage heap. Extremely frustrating. Will never buy another Dell.
I've disabled the touchpad and so far everything seems to be okay. For example, I've typed this whole message with no problem!
This is a very common issue with touchpads so I am rather confident this will solve this issue. While you are SURE you are not touching it you MAY. It is also fairly common for the silly things to be overly sensitive.
As brilliant as those people are, I don't understand why they couldn't come up with some kind of built-in mouse device instead of something as atrocious as the touchpad.
Greatest pointer of all time. You can only get them with a higher end Lenovo now. Once you got used to the 'eraser head' it was the best mouse ever.
I hated it, or at least the iteration I used. The cursor is barely moving, let me just give it a little more pressure and Bam, it accelerates to terminal velocity as it zooms across the screen, breaks through the bezel, and flies across the room.
I also loved the eraser, as well, but I believe Valdosta is in a much larger majority. My group was given Armada 7800 laptops when Compaq bought Digital and it had the eraser. It look just a little practice to get the pressure right but the eraser allowed the victim to move quickly and very accurately. It was great for meetings where you wanted to look like you weren't doing anything. One feature that laptop had that was wonderful was having two removalable hard drives, as in slide out and in. My group was preparing internal training on the upcoming Windows 2000 Server and Exchange Server 2000 with the internal releases in Microsoft so it was great to be able to keep the various iterations physically separately. I could just reformat the drives every week as new released came down.
I tried swapping out a hard drive/main drive with a new one and a real operating system and nope... that freaking motherboard is integrated into their factory hard drive in a way that made it impossible to swap out.
I will never buy a Dell either. Tried to add a hard drive to a desktop once and... forget it. They have some crappy propitiatory motherboard chips that will not accept any type of alterations with the drive system. And then the main hard drive stopped working altogether. Could not replace it. I build my own desktops now (with the full version operating systems, no OEM crap) and I would NEVER buy a Dell laptop. So, I too tossed my Dell.
I have a laptop that runs on Window 10 and it was running pathetically slow too... I fixed it by running a System File Checker tool... Works like a charm. Run the command prompt on administrator and type: sfc /scannow (hit enter) then let the computer fix itself. It takes some time but it will fix or replace corrupted files and make your computer run lightning fast again.
As many times as I've ran this and it not found anything, it's a very nice tool to have at your disposal. I've never ran into any issues using it, and is a part of most troubleshooting guides. CHKDSK was another handy one.
My computer had all kinds of corrupted files and missing files. That tool fixed it in short order and my computer has been lightning fast ever since. But I sill run it ever 5 time I run my computer and there is nothing to fix. You can task your computer to run it automatically every time you start it, but that seemed like overkill to me. CHKDSK is a good tool too.
